Category Archives: Ravens

A New Year

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Bolinas Alter

The end of one story.  The beginning of another.

On the first day of the new year, Anna and I awoke before dawn and took Poe’s remains to Bolinas.  We drove through the Sonoma and Marin darkness, past the unseen dairy and cattle hills, toward and eventually into the San Andreas fault zone.  As the sky lightened we dropped into the narrow crack that separates the North American Plate from the Pacific Plate and we crossed over to that new continent that moment by moment is shedding itself northward and away from our world.

We left Poe at the maritime shrine on the main street along with a photograph of his younger self.  Afterwards we ran on the rocky beach against the roar of the receding surf, watching the flyovers of the resident ravens and hawks.

We left Bolinas later that morning.  Driving out of town, I looked to my right.  An open meadow.  And across stretched a line of 22 fenceposts.  And on each sat a solitary raven, all warily eyeing the world.  Eyeing perhaps even our own departure.

Ravens in Bolinas

The First Feeding

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20111222-124051.jpgThe turkey vultures have come to feast.

It took three days. But they’re here now in full force. And it’s been quite the party. They circle low and Mango loves chasing them. Even the horse down in the corral down the way became excited. Our neighbor came over and was wondering what had gotten under his skin – he was prancing and snorting, his tail held high. The vultures, however, had been circling and feeding for much of the morning. In addition to the impression of their tremendous mass, what feelings do they incite in other species? The horse was clearly unnerved.

What other conjecture do the birds summon?

  1. They are patient, keen observers. The splayed open body of the raccoon rested on the roof of the chicken house for two days before I noticed the first flyover. It was near dusk and two vultures flew slowly over the chicken house, circled once and continued on their way. They waited another two days before they began to work the body. I wonder how much they observed before they decided it was safe to eat? And do they use the close flyovers to test the animal to see if it’s still alive? Living creatures tend to run and bolt at the flyovers.
  2. They have at least some semblance of cognition and work their food. They didn’t feed on the roof. Instead one of the birds lifted the raccoon corpse off the roof and moved it 7 feet to a spot on the ground where they could easily circle and rest while picking at the flesh. They ate the first side of the raccoon on the first evening. The next morning they rotated his body a full 180 degrees to more easily get at his other side. Later I moved the remains and hanging entrails to the tree outside our house. Within hours they had removed the body from the tree and once again were working it on the ground just outside our dining room window. Do they have a set routine in how they will dismember and eat an animal?
  3. They may be highly social animals that work collaboratively. So far I’ve seen a primary pair that are sometimes accompanied by a third. Only one bird eats at a time. The other two either perch in the tree, on the backs of the garden furniture, or sit on the ground. In all instances they face outward toward the open meadow, watching it seems for any advancing threats. This morning when the neighbors pit approached from the meadow, the feeding raven stopped and joined the other two gazing outward. As the pit advanced, the birds slowly took flight. Two of the birds seemed to have disappeared for the day, while one remained in the tree. When my friend Danny walked outside, the bird descended from the tree and circled the carrion raccoon as if protecting it. Was the bird guarding the food? Or was it taking flight in self-defense? How do they communicate? How are responsibilities divided among the group? Is their a pecking hierarchy?
  4. They may have an acute sense of hearing. I was watching the birds with binoculars from our dining room window. At some point my cellphone sitting on the far side of the room in the kitchen chirped when an email came in. The turkey vulture outside and 10 feet from the house started and looked up in my direction. I know for certain that I would not have been able to hear the phone from outside the house. How to test their audial and visual acuity?
  5. They can quickly discern friend from foe and react accordingly. The first few times I walked outside in their presence they were startled and flew away. They watched, however, when I retrieved the raccoon and relocated it. And they also watched a couple times as I walked in and out of the house without bothering them. It only took a couple passes before they became accustomed to my presence and ignored me. Mango with all his bark and scampering on the other hand, is another story.
  6. Their necks and beaks may have adapted to small prey. Watching the vulture pick flesh with it’s beak, I thought of the vultures on the Mara. The birds there have long extensible necks that they thrust deep into the chest cavities of the wildebeest, elephants, or whatever other megafauna they feed on. North America hasn’t had megafauna for at least 15,000 years and nothing on the scale of what was in Africa. Did different carrion birds evolve different beak and neck structures that would allow them to feed on different kinds of animals? Have carrion birds evolved different strategies for dismembering corpses? I would imagine that an adult vulture has a far keener understanding of raccoon anatomy than I do. They’ve undoubtedly feasted on dozens of roadkill.

There you have it. Twenty minutes of observation and six questions.

And I haven’t even planted the garden bulbs. Or assembled the apiary.

 

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The Host and the Kill

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Time to get back with the program.

I found him in the morning while walking Mango. He lay on the side of the road at the other end of the 40 acres, his body fully intact. His chest cavity still had a trace of warmth, though rigor mortis had started to set in. Without any real clear intent, I picked him up, much to the chagrin of a waiting turkey vulture that immediately took flight.

I thought he was beautiful. He was heavy, heavier than one might think. Carrying his dead body, he felt something like a small dog. The pelt was thick, and the tail less pliable than it looks. His teeth and claws are predatory, ready to sink into any small vole – or wounded raven, perhaps – that he might happen across.

It all led to the basic question that ultimately faces everything: how best to send him on?

I could bury him, though that seemed respectful only in our world in which we seek to hide the look and stink of death. A waste of a perfectly good carcass, as Kerry Hardy would put it. I could gut him and do something with the luscious pelt, but I felt his native form was too beautiful to render into ornamentation. I could only screw it up. Kerry suggested eating him. Anna, of course, was worried about hydrophobia.

It took a good day for the answer to present itself.

This morning I drew a knife neatly down the middle of his chest and peeled back the pelt revealing the rose bloom of his chest. Lacking animus, his body now existed nearly exclusively as matter. But not quite. His matter still contains resident within a potency. We call it vitality. Enough that other creatures may seek to take it and draw it into their own.

We call this eating. On one side of the divide: sacrifice. On the other, rendered by consumption, it becomes the sacrament and the eater the sanctified.

Isn’t that ultimately what it meant in the transformation of the Host?

I took the body of that poor coon and splayed it on the roof of the old chicken barn out beyond our house. It’s within clear line of sight of our deck and bedroom windows. In a few days it will begin to stink.

If I’m lucky, the neighboring creatures will be hungry enough to overcome the fear of this place and of us. You all are welcome here I say to them. To the ravens. To the crows and vultures. To all the scavengers. I want them to come to this home and feed.

It really is time for me to get on with it. We have a wonderful home. And I’m back in it.

Here’s the invite. If you’re wild, I’ll feed you raccoon.

For the rest of you, I have a table to build. And things to grow. And kill. And render. It will be beautiful and delicious.

Come. You’re all welcome. It’s time to sate the hunger.

 

Island of the Blue Dolphins

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Mo was our cat, and at the last minute as Anna was leaving Hopi, he leapt out of the car.  Anna was tired, expectant and preoccupied.  She wanted to get that cat, but it wasn’t her priority and in the end she didn’t have it in her.  She was thinking of other things.  She camped by the culverts for a full six hours trying to lure him, but when all was said and done,  it was all she could give and so she got on her way.

The book always made me so sad when I was little. To think of the little girl marooned all alone by herself on that island.  Left to raise herself into an uncertain future.  Even then I wanted to reach out to her.  I wanted her to be safe.

Some would say it’s stupid to travel halfway across the country to rescue a scared and bewildered animal.  But such as it was.  Someone, someone in this wide world has to do it.  Otherwise, what really are we here for?

So I climbed into the car and drove 15 hours straight back to Arizona.  I spent 30 hours up at Hopi.  I found the life that we had built there completely dismembered and gone.   The ramada had been ripped to the ground, the gardens dug up, the fencing tore down.  There was nothing left of our life there.

I spent the weekend combing that empty neighborhood for the cat.  I crawled through mud and across tumbleweeds, caking my chest in bull heads, peering through both ends of filthy culverts.  I called out again and again for a white kitten.

And in the while, I learned a little about animal ways.  How when they get scared they hide and they dig in for dear life.  How we have favorite spots and they nurture us and give us comfort.  I found the culvert ends where he crouched in the soft mud leaving hieroglyphs of paw prints.  And where he would eat, and the puddles from which he would lap his water.  I found two dead birds at the stoop of Pearish’s porch.  He was still hunting, and he wanted to please, he wanted to remain connected with humans, with us, and show he was still present.

He was independent and well good enough to fend for himself.  Most creatures do.  For those of us still standing, it’s what’s allowed us to survive for near forever.

But he was so scared.  Too scared to even come out and face me and an uncertain future.  Too scared of retribution and fear of what may happen.

In the end we were saved by a Hopi security man.  He had spent weeks watching him on the hospital security cameras.  His watchful eyes are what saved us.

He was the one who saw him and alerted me to the fenced parking lot where Mo was sequestered.

I climbed the fence with a can of sardines.  Again and again he bolted from me.  So I lay on the hot pavement and I spoke to him.

I was so proud of him, I said.  He had survived for all this time nearly all on his own.  He was a mighty animal, fierce and independent, and smart enough to live.  But there were some things he did not know, I told him.  Winter was coming.  And his family was never coming back.  And if he stayed here, if he was too afraid to join us, then here he would die.

It was a long way to our new home.  I told him that it would not be easy.  That this journey would feel to him excruciating and endlessly long, but that Mango the dog and the other cats and the chickens and all of us had already made it.  It was just he alone that had stayed here.  And our life here was no more.  Most people had already left and decamped for other places.  The birds themselves would soon be flown, and the mice that he hunted and fed on would soon be burrowed deep in the ground.  Come to me.  Please, I asked.  Please.  Trust me.  It will all be okay.  It will all be alright.

He walked and nuzzled against my arm.  And I grabbed him.  Loving him so much I gripped him to my chest, and carried him in a near death lock strong enough to defy the sink of his teeth and his clawing scratches.

The End

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A raven was born, and wounded, and lived for a short time in this world.

He was taken at night by an animal.  He could offer no defense.  I knew straightaway where to go.  I found his severed head at the base of towering redwood tree.

Poe, I write this to you.

I am so sorry I was the cause of your destruction.  You believed in me and I kept screwing it up.  You did your best and I was the one who pulled the football away.

I don’t know where a raven’s spirit goes when it dies.  But I want you to find it within you a way to forgive. But forgiveness may only be in the province of humans, an unnecessary convention unsuited to the ways of birds.   I can listen for you and your own.  I can assign meaning.  It’s only an assignation, but it’s all I know how to do.

And in the end, what all do you care for my mortal shit?  You’re birds.  You do  your justice and sup on the departed.

Final Days

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Our furniture arrived in the middle of September.  Two movers hefted and shoved and carried on their backs more possessions than any being should have to bear.  They got it all in our house.  I brought Poe home that night from Occidental.  His eye was blind, his feathers falling out, he refused to preen or care for himself.  He spent the night inside, afraid to leave his courier cage.  In the morning he emerged and shit all over our dining room table.

He stayed with me while I unpacked boxes.  I spread packing paper across the floor and he receded into it.  Unable to see, he squawked and panicked whenever I approached him.  He could no longer perch, so he sat on the papered floor.

In the day I set him up outside on the lawn and he caught sun.  I fed him apples and cheese, that he no longer touched.  In the evening, he hopped onto the porch and walked inside.  The house was in chaos, boxes and junk everywhere.  I felt sick to my stomach and so did he.  His watery shit ran across the floor.  His sounds were few, just feeble cries.

I apologized, but apologies don’t matter a whit.  I couldn’t make it any better.  I told him if he could meet me half way, I could help him.  But I couldn’t do anything if didn’t want to make it better.  It was his choice, I told him.  And if it was too much to bear, he could end it.

All he felt from me was chaos and fear and anger.  And in the end, perhaps it only left him bewildered.

Anna drove a night and a day to get to us.  She had the chickens and dog and two of our cats loaded in with her, and I released them all hoping Poe would find them familiar friends and be happy for company.  He hopped away and buried his body and head against the rocks.

I knew Anna didn’t want him in the house.  So that night I set him on his perch outside.  I gave him a sampling of meat and cantaloupe and water.

I told him everything would be alright. And that’s how I left him.

Talk to the Animals

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Her name was Ariana Strozzi.  And she ran a place called Skyhorse Ranch.

I’d been given her name by someone in the coffee shop.  She worked with animals, I was told.  She knew a lot about birds.

A few days after returning to town, I fetched Poe from Occidental.  Penny was right.  He looked to be a complete mess, missing feathers, agitated, afraid to come near me.  I know of someone who maybe can help you, I told him.

That day, I took Poe to Valley Ford. We descended into that overcast channel west of Petaluma that leads on to the ocean. We drove up to Skyhorse ranch, a horse farm high on the hill overlooking the barren valley.  I pulled past the horse corrals to the house.  Ariana welcomed me at the door.  She appeared collected and thoughtful.  She invited Poe and I into her house and allowed me to take him from the carrier.

Ariana led workshops on interspecies communication, primarily with horses.  Animals were her thing.  They operate on the level of feeling and to be with them we need to quiet the noise inside ourselves.  She wasn’t part of the rehabilitation community and was a renegade of sorts.  On her own she worked with a whole range of predatory birds.  Hawks, peregrines, owls.  And ravens.

Ariana had done her graduate work at UC Davis.  While there, she had developed a system for wing rehabilitation using intensive physical therapy wedded to bird instinct. When she finished, she had been recruited to help with condor reintroduction on the North Rim. Her job would have been to prevent the birds from human imprinting.

Ariana felt that the ravens see everything and they know in deep way what we’re about.  She told me a story.  A while ago, her marriage was falling apart, she told me, and she didn’t want to admit it.  She was up at the ranch at the time, and the birds would come to her, they would follow her where she went and caw incessently.  Until one afternoon in a rage she stood outside her barn and called out what she had known all along and and she shouted and screamed to the birds and the world and the birds were at last silent.

I sat in the living room with her and Poe.  He sat on her table and she watched him, unconcerned as he shit over her living room floor.  She fed him meal worms. She was concerned about his thinness and his diet.  He needed field mice and insects, she said.  He sat calmly in her presence and preened.  She confidently took Poe by the legs and body and thrust him through diving motions again and again.

It wasn’t good, she said.  His right wing was damaged and fused shut.  His left wing seemed paralytic also, and his left foot wouldn’t grip properly.  In the diving motion he failed to respond instinctively by thrusting out his wing.

I doubt he will ever fly again, she said.

And if I take him to a wildlife refuge? I asked.

They’ll put him down, she said.

He can’t be a raven.  But can he live a life, a full life? I asked.

She smiled.  He can, she said.  Absolutely.  It’s clear that you have a special bond, she said.  You know one another and he trusts your presence.  He can be a happy member of your family.  He craves social interaction.  You can integrate him into your family.  When you eat, he can sit with you at the table.  He can be with you as you go about your day.  Stimulate him, pay attention, work with him and his life can be as full as any.

I thanked her.

I knew what I wanted to do.  I wanted to do this thing we call life, diminished though it may be.

Betrayal

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He believed in me.  We were friends, in a strange way bound to one another.  Abandoned into this world, I would like to think that he wanted to believe in me.

But I was busy.  I was distracted.  I was trying to take care of my daughter. To get her to school and coach her on homework.  To buy a house and an adjoining orchard.  To talk to my wife.  To be married to my wife.  I don’t know what he thought, but I believed he just wanted to see me.  I visited best I could, but it became sporadic.  And then I left.  I had to go to Telluride and then Hopi to help with the movers.  Penny and Michael and their daughter Loren stepped in.  Each morning one or the other would try and they would feed and sit with him.

Penny called while I was away.  Poe wasn’t doing well, she said.  He seemed sad.  He was hiding away.  He seemed to miss me, she said.  He had stopped preening and a wasp had stung him in the eye and it was swollen shut.

He just wanted me to be there for him, to listen to him, to give him hope, to tend to a broken wing.

But isn’t that what betrayal is?  Distraction?  An increment of cuts?

The Orchard and the Raven

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It was partway through the transaction that I learned the adjoining orchard was for sale.  People had known and no one had told me and I was livid.  Like all the old Grav orchards in the area, it was destined to go to vineyard.  The water would be drawn down, pesticides would be sprayed.

But it wasn’t just that, can you understand?  It was an old way of life, it was the culture of the Gravenstein orchards that had shaped this town for nearly a century.  And it was the life itself, one hundred and twenty apple trees, many over 80 years old.  Whom do you know who has lived to see eighty years? Termite ridden, some barely husk and bark, they still yielded apples.  Year after year giving up their own progeny so that others could drink and take sustenance.  A collective 100,000 years of sentience would be taken out because they couldn’t turn a profit.  By that measure, I should have been dead a long time ago.

So I had a vision.  I’m prone to visions and they sometimes overtake me.  Rarely to great fruition.  Sometimes to no good at all.  All the same I had a vision.

We would buy this orchard.  We would somehow find a way to make it work.  I would learn how to care for Gravenstein apple trees and we would learn to press our own cider and make our own vinegar.  We would have this raven Poe and over time he would get better, we would nurse him back to health and he would be our family mascot and my friend and companion.  Our home and the orchard and the adjoining parcels would become a haven where our friends, and the wild turkeys and the quail and deer and ravens, where all manner of life could come and live.  We would do this crazy thing and we would do it together.

But Anna would have nothing of it.  She was away in Arizona, Mazie and I in California.  Me running between her school, and a sick bird, and the county recorders and a West County real estate office.  Anna said it was too much to take on and what was the point.  She was distracted and preoccupied, and what with all it was hard for her to get the time to listen.

She didn’t want to be tied down, she said.  She wanted to be free and unhampered by an orchard.

I finally did figure out how we could get the land, but I was five days two late.  The vineyard people bought it.  Four days later the bulldozers arrived and began to rip out the trees.

That night I walked out into the orchard, and row by row, I sprinkled homa, and laid my hands on each and every tree standing and fallen. I said I was sorry.  It began to rain, slowly, then heavily and I trudged on in the mud and the dark.  I thanked them for all the life that they gave, for their sacrifice, for everything they had given.

A house is just a house, my father-in-law once admonished.  You are the moveable feast.

You can say that.  But it doesn’t matter in the end.  The truth?  Dreams and dreamers are just slim pickings.

The House

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There’s another part that I’m not telling you.

It’s about the little boy who a long time ago lost his father and his mother grew away from him into her new boyfriend or her own sleep and he grew up in a crumbling house with a shitty carpet filled with fleas and stinking of cat spray.  Dishes would pile in the sink because no one would care to wash them until no dishes were left and even then it would move no one to lift a finger so they turned to paper bowls and plates.  On those days, it would be the boy who would stand on a chair to reach the sink and he would do the dishes, scraping rotting peanut butter from the knife, skimming flies and sheets of mold from the pots filled with putrid water.  It would take a full twelve hours for an eight year old boy to clean that kitchen.

There was a brother and once he wanted dog and it came into the house.  But no one would take care of it or feed it and it got sick and was kept penned up in the kitchen until the floor became a seething sea of shit and piss and diarrhea.  A neighbor visited and put a call out to CPS.

There’s more.  I could go on and on with more.  I could fill the remainder of my life and a catastrophe of pages with more.  But this will be sufficient.

Imagine what happened, how it was, when the boy first read Gatsby and how Fitzgerald seized him with a vision.  Just get the hell away.  Get as far and fast away as you possibly can.  Build a mansion.  Populate it with people.  Fill it with parties and surround yourself with campfires.  Night after night.  Go to that place, make that place, with your own majesty and desire will it in to being.  Matter not that the story ends in tragedy.  That all can be worked out in the details.

How stupid for a boy to be driven by such a silly story.

But he was.

I imagined one day arriving at a house.  It would be a grand place and it would be protected from anything bad or sullied that would want to intercede from the world.  It would have it’s own water, and good soil and could grow food.  It would be surrounded by protected space that would never in anyone’s lifetime ever be developed.

A family could grow and could grow old here.  And that’s the way it would be.

A New Life

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The coming days were flush with the banal.

Mazie and I, waiting for school to begin, shifted our ways to a local hotel.  They had a pool which Mazie was hot to swim in.  We joked about our big and fancy house. Poe, he stayed put in his hotel in Occidental.

On the last day of summer I took Mazie to the Harry Potter movie in Santa Rosa.  It was a dad daughter day and Mazie was pleased and funny and grateful, I think to have her dad’s attention.

On the first day at school, I drove Mazie from the hotel.  That first morning, nervous as heck, she asked that I walk her to the office, we check in, and then we walk out and as we did so she would peel away.  In that way, just as she dictated, I delivered her to her new school.

The kids were different, she later told me.  But she’s grown up resilient, and slowly, in her own way, she set to making friends.

Mazie and I would have breakfast each morning in the hotel lobby.  She would pack a lunch for herself from whatever she could scavenge from the hotel breakfast line: a piece of fruit, some juice, a PB&J.  I would then drive her to school.  In the evening I’d pick her up, we’d settle back into our hotel room, and Mazie would diligently sit and do her homework.

As for Poe, he became my own affair.  Some mornings and most afternoons I’d drive to Occidental and up into the meadow, where I would set with him.  I’d nap in the straw while he perched near me.  I’d feed him and talk to him.  He would sometimes mutter back.  I called Anna on the phone.  I wanted to tell her about the bird, but when we talked he would caw loudly until Anna would tell me to get out of the coop.  It was hard to talk with the bird near by, she said.

People seek solace and meaning and fire, and we each seek it in our own way.

I found it in dreaming of and fashioning for ourselves a new life.  I found it in Poe.

In the end, I think he just bugged her.

What Happens When You Believe

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I took a bunch of pictures to share, but now even that seems too much of a bother.

I had hoped that Poe could settle in at the Salmon Creek school in Occidental.  The school is set on 20 acres of meadow and redwood forest and wetland.  It also has an enormous fenced garden where I fancied Poe could hang out and regain a semblance of self.  Mazie and I took him there in the afternoon and set him free.

He enjoyed digging and exploring with his beak.  He hopped about in the wood chips and tussled with the greenery.  Mazie read quietly beneath an arbor.  Other ravens cawed out from the surrounding forest. Lovely clouds piled high in the sky and that afternoon the light felt marvelous and true.  I called Kerry.  We both were hopeful.  Perhaps Poe’s rehabilitation could become part of a school science program.  He could stay in the garden and mend.  And kids at the school could learn what it meant to be in close proximity to wildlife and maybe they figure out how to engineer some structure that would meet the needs of a wounded raven.

You see, this was all going to work out, or so it seemed.

But school would not start for a few more days.  The afternoon waned.  We gathered Poe into his carrier and in the setting light we drove up the hill and out of the valley.  Penny, the co-owner of the Holy Cow had offered her house up as a refuge.  She had an enormous chicken coop – the chicken hotel, she called it.  And hotel it was.  Ten feet high, fifteen across, open chicken wire walls all around facing out into meadow and oaks.  Poe took to the space immediately.  He ate and preened and hopped about in the straw.  Families and ravens flying over head would call out as they headed home to their roost.  Poe listened and called out in return.

Michael and Penny and I and even Mazie were elated.  Poe was safe.  I was safe, we all were, in the august darkness.

 

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Faith

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Is Charlie Brown believing again and again that Lucy won’t pull the football away from him.

My uncle once said that faith was believing in something that you knew was not true.  In this case, though, I really believed.  I believed it would all unfold as planned.

That first morning, Mazie and I, the raven in tow, made our way back to the Holy Cow.  Mazie and I settled down with cups of coffee and hot chocolate.  We waited until Michael the owner came around.

He remembered us from the month before.  Excited, grateful to have an ally, I ushered him outside and opened the car.  He looked inside and saw Poe inside the carrier.

Holy shit, he said.

He got it.  And I was so grateful to no longer be alone.  For he felt the awe.

I set to explaining how Poe had been held captive by the rehabilitator and that it was no good, and how –

You fucking stole him, he interrupted.  He grinned.  That’s so cool, he said, adding that we’d fit in just fine here.

He looked in again at the poor bird.  You can’t keep him in there, he said.  Bring him into the coffee shop.

And that I did.  And like that the three of us set at the table, health codes and wildlife regulations be damned, with Poe the raven holding court over all and customers coming forward and stopping dead in their tracks.  My god, each one said.

For those highly social birds are of their own world and not of ours, and though parallel, they scant intersect.  To be here in a coffee house on main street sebastopol, why to come full face with his claw-like beak and opal eyes and the impenetrable sheen of his blackness.  Poe was the ineffable born into flesh, and that day in the coffee shop, customers wanted only to be near him.  They wanted to touch it.

Mazie made friends with Michael’s daughter, Loren.  They made plans to get together and hang out.  They talked about the schools they would be going to.

Strangers approached and gave us their phone numbers, they had ideas of how to help.  They offered homes where he could stay.

That is what home feels like.  We had found safe harbor.

Mooring

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I could go on here forever, couldn’t I?

Although if you go on for too long,  your audience goes away.  They cease to listen.

What difference?  For most of my life, my writing has had an audience of one.  What difference does another ten or twenty make?

And in the end, who really does care about a bird and the string of betrayals exercised by and visited upon a single life?

That first night we stayed the night with our friend Hank in Santa Rosa.  We set up fencing in the backyard to protect Poe from the two dogs.  Once released, he squawked with agitation, pacing the pavement, bereft it seemed in his new environment.  I played bad father and bad guest, ignoring Mazie, feeding the bird, wanting badly to calm him, mindless to the shit he deposited all over the patio.

We slept fitfully.

Arrival

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It rarely is what it seems.  And sometimes it holds everything that is.

You might as well all know. Mazie and Poe and I ended up in Northern California.

On that first night, we needed nothing more than safe harbor.  Mazie needed some emotional relief.  And Poe needed most of all to be released from his confinement.

We drove direct to the home of our friends Mary and Al.  They’re family friends and to tell the truth we had nowhere else to go.  We parked in their driveway at their small mid-century stucco home.  They weren’t home.  But they had a decent sized yard and so we took Poe straight back there and let him out beneath a towering redwood.  He hopped away distressed and set his distance.  I fed him bits of pizza and old meat and whatever I had with.  A cat appeared and I barked at Mazie to hold the cat back, but she had a hard time doing it.

I thought maybe Poe could hang out in this yard for the evening and that he would be safe.  But I was way wrong.  There was no respite to be had here.  I called Michael from Holy Cow and then Maryanne, but no one was picking up.  Spent, I rounded Poe up and put him back in the dog carrier.  Mazie was frazzled and upset herself.  She needed as much tending as the bird.  Why was the bird getting it all, she asked?

Because if he doesn’t get what he needs, he’s going to die, I said.

We piled back in the car.  Because it was now time for Mazie’s school orientation.

We drove the scant six blocks to Mazie’s middle school where, in five days, Mazie was going to settle in to where she was going to spend the next year of her life.

Mazie didn’t want people to see us with the bird.  So we left Poe in the car while we entered the school gymnasium.  It was filled with a crowd of white middle to upper income folk.  Which I guess is what we now were.  The principal, a warm and nice man, introduced the school and the various programs and what children and parents could expect.  It was going to be a wonderful year, he said.

As we exited the gym, tears welled up in Mazie’s eyes.  I don’t want to go to this school, she whispered.

Mazie and I no longer knew how to live in this world.

Berkeley

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My father came here once and he camped out in the Doe library one foggy summer in the 1960’s searching the stacks for archival material about mining journalism in Nevada during the great silver rush.  He found a forlorn journal kept by a woman named Martha Galley in which she recorded her lonesomeness, the absence of her husband and the death of her children.  The last thing my dad did in this world was try to publish it, but by then it was too late and he was already out of time.

My grandmother and my aunt came to join him.  When my grandmother was a little girl in Philadelphia near the turn of the century she was run over by a carriage and it broke her back.  After that she was hunched and stooped and couldn’t play with the other kids and so she set to walking and that she did, up to ten or twenty miles a day.  Tilden Park? she once asked me.  Do you know Tilden Park?  Up in the hills?  Every day I would walk from the Rose Garden all the way up the hill to Tilden Park and back down again, she said.

My grandmother was in her sixties at the time and she would walk all the way to goddamn Tilden Park.

I went to Berkeley once.

I had completed my sophomore year in college and all I wanted to do at that time was run fast and far away.  I studied Russian during the summer and I stayed on for the fall.  I worked at Blondie’s pizza, sometimes prepping in the back, sometimes delivering on a scooter at night.  Once I didn’t strap the pizza boxes on right and they flew off the back all over the road.  I ended giving them up for free to the college kids who had ordered them.

I liked the feeling of riding that scooter fast through the night.  The scooter was red.

I found out that summer that my girlfriend was fucking some other guy.  It was my fault, she said.  I wasn’t there for her, she said.  It didn’t matter.  We didn’t have a good relationship anyway.  I’d cheated on my first girlfriend to go out with her.  None of us were any good.

I was living with a guy named Don at the time, right up there near Tilden Park, and I couldn’t stay down in town past three-thirty because that’s when the Livermore shuttle took it’s last run.  I didn’t want to walk up that hill.  My friend Kenny wondered what my problem was, why couldn’t I walk up a hill? he asked.  You walk up that hill, I told him and he tried and he scarce could do it.

Don was dating Maddie Wegner that summer.  He was madly in love and he confided in me that he loved her so much, that she was the one and he was going to propose to her.  He had it all planned out.  He bought her a ring and later in the summer when they were going to be driving through South Dakota, one sunset evening he was going to propose to her.

And that he did.  Except that she had no inkling he was in love with her.  She sat there with him somewhere in the midwest, embarrassed in the waning light, looking at the ring he held in his hand.  He was a nice boy, she said.  A sweet boy.  And that’s where she left it.

I would get out at the Livermore Center and walk the deer trail along the hillside and would hunker down by the wind organ and watch the sun make it’s way toward the horizon and at times the colors would be so profound that I would laugh and howl as if I’d lost my senses.

—

But now, on that afternoon, the one that matters most to us, my daughter and I and the bird arrived unclean and tired and needing food. We cut into town and found the Bread Board across from Chez Panisse.  We ordered pizza topped with goat cheese and peaches. We ate it sitting on a grassy divide in the middle of the road. The flavors were rank and disgusting and it made me such.  Mazie hardly touched it.  For Poe it was much the same.

All journeys, all races run, pass through a place of dissipation and I guess for us maybe this was it.  Mazie and I ate what we could in this place transitional and transcending as it has always been, and we piled then into the car and we headed north taking wrong turn after wrong turn after wrong turn until we found ourselves passing across the Delta, that swampland once parceled to the wanderings of Jack London and the tin boot fortunes of China camps, and rogue vagrants and bums and residents who had but fled all there was to flee from.

On this evening the light glinted flat across the misty water, posing an ephemeral halo for the yawning dilapidated penitentiary, and for Saint Quentin himself, I guess, tortured and beheaded as he was.  And now what stores of the unrepentant, lead and gold alike, were bound and locked tight within his chest, doing time for whatever crimes done unto?

Unseen, hardly a mote we were, Mazie and I and our companion bird passed across those mud flats, past chambered prisoners and flocks of crane set to taking flight.  By them all we passed.

 

Promised Land

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Some of you want to know what all has become of Poe.  The questioning, the wondering is fair enough.  And the silence and all has been unfair.  But some’s too much to tell.  But now you can have it. We can carry on.

We – Mazie, the bird and I – we left Barstow at dawn.

But not before absconding with some boiled egg and bread and sausage from the Best Western breakfast nook.  Once on the road, Poe set to caching his food amidst the newspaper in his carrier.

We blitzed California, racing up the 99 through that industrial farming hell, past warehouses, processing plants, sprayers, herbicide distributors, and miles of enslaved trees, genes, and soil and vine, Poe the raven himself bearing witness to the near incomprehensible machination and subjugation of all life to sate a specie’s hunger.

I told Mazie that her grandmother came to California because of a book written by a man named Steinbeck.  It was East of Eden and had been made into a movie by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean in which he became movement and life and desire incarnate.  It was about old California farming communities, and rivalry and lust and inheritance and the inevitable despoiling of the world through our actions.  About the Monterrey morning mist and the fields outside of Gilroy, and about old honor establishing itself in a new land.  My mother had wanted, I think, to be part of California before it was all gone and now it mostly was, at least this part of it.

And in this moment, we, my daughter and I, came to this place to be the bad kid, to find wildness and prove it upon the world once again.

Ashley, our GPS guidance system gave us a few bum steers, out of malice I think, because we hadn’t been giving her much due.  We passed out of the Central Valley, now draped with box stores and outlets for extruded meat, potato and corn products and descended into the Bay Area. Past those quixotic wind mills, harvesting that relentless mass of air pressing itself eastward from the pacific.  Past Livermore, that cesspool of life and death, beginnings and ends, where Edward Teller, in all of his fin de siecle Mitteleurop sensitivities, gave birth to the hydrogen bomb.  Is that what this state, in so much that it’s a state of being, is good for?

Of these things, though, I couldn’t intimate to my daughter.  And lest of all the bird, fragile and innocent and all-knowing intelligence that he may be.  Mazie was cranky and tired.  The bird was cooped.  And so relentlessly we pressed on.

The Bay Area. The Area of the Bay.

Cliffhanger

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Paddy Mitchell

It seems I’ve left a lot of friends and readers hanging by their fingernails on the white crumbly chalk of Dover.

But not for long.  There’ve been a lot of developments yet that need a clear moment for me to tap out.

In the meanwhile, two nights ago, 10 pm California time and Mazie and I are holed up in a bottom feeder in Petaluma.  It seems every room in the county is booked up on account of some speedway event.  So we’re relegated to this grim shoebox pinned between a mostly vacant industrial park, victim of the Great Bubble, and an indian casino wedged in by the 101.  Roar of a freeway outside, the sheets smell like pee and loud banging emanates from the room next door.

The phone rings.  It’s Poppy Davis from the USDA (more on Poppy later).  It’s one a.m. in D.C. and she’s doing her best to impersonate an official from Fish and Wildlife.

She eventually breaks.  Remember when I had to reprimand Mazie for writing about your youthful indiscretions on Facebook? she asks.

I do.

Well now I’m doing the same for you, she says.  YOUR WIFE IS A DOCTOR.  You cannot be writing about illegal activities on your blog.

Yeah.  She’s right.  Which is why I tried to password protect it, but in the end it would have required too much policing and management, and as long as our exact whereabouts are not disclosed – well heck, California’s a big state.

And who would Paddy Mitchell and the Stopwatch Gang have been without their brazenness?  It distinguishes the petty thief from legend.

I peek out the curtain and look down at the tawdry lights from the casino.  I didn’t know their were any gaming tribes down this way.  A minivan weaves erratically through the parking lot.

What would a raven do? 

The Hideout

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It’s bad.

We checked into a Best Western in Barstow late at night. We snuck Poe up to the room, drew the curtains and considered our situation.

It was basically no different than that of all the other criminals holed up in Barstow that night. We’d done wrong, had a kidnap victim in our possession, and were high on junk food.

No sooner had we passed Kingman when Kerry started getting the calls. The rehabilitator, upset and frantic, had been on the phone, accusing Kerry of having stolen the bird. She didn’t even have to waterboard him, and within minutes he was already pointing the finger at me. A century of abolitionist roots and Maine tenancy down the tubes. Sorry, Kerry.

And the rehabilitator had set to calling our house. She worried that I would release him to the wild and that he wasn’t ready. And I think she was just plain ticked that we had taken him from right under her husband’s nose.

Anna insisted that I call the woman back, but Kerry and I concurred there would be little utility in doing so. She was nice enough and had done her part, but there was little point in looking back at that phase in Poe’s life.

Besides, I didn’t want her to have my cell. And if she was really hot under the collar, she could use it to trace our whereabouts.

And lastly, we had bigger fish to fry. We were camped out in the Mojave with this dang bird that we needed to keep alive. The first priority was just getting to our destination and getting him out of the dog carrier. His life had already been hell enough.

We set Poe so he could watch us sleep and shut our eyes for the night.

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Poe hiding out in Barstow

On the Lam

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So that’s how my daughter and I became fugitives.

We bolted left then right then left out of the suburban neighborhood. We got caught behind a truck trying to make a left hand turn, all the while eyeing the rear view mirror while Poe sat swaddled in Mazie’s lap.

Within minutes we were on the Interstate heading west toward California. Ten miles down the road we pulled onto a side road and released Poe into the dog carrier which we positioned again on Mazie’s lap. We got back on the highway and once we were safely past Bearizona in Williams (where I was afraid the rehabilitator might be), we pulled off once again and positioned Poe behind us, giving him a full frontal view of the road ahead.

We all felt elated – Mazie couldn’t believe we stole a raven, I was pumped that Poe had a fighting chance, and as for Poe, I think he was just glad to be free of jackhammers.

Mazie and I talked contingencies. Keep your eye out for highway patrol, I told her.  Once we crossed the border into California we’d be a measure more safe.  If we were pulled over for any reason, she would drape the sweatshirt over the carrier. If anybody asked, it was a pet animal that was easily agitated. If anyone caught sight of him and had questions, we were rehabilitators taking him to a sanctuary in California. We decided we would keep him covered when we passed through the border inspection station.

Early evening, we pulled into an In n Out and ordered Poe a cheeseburger with fries. He didn’t take to the deep fried potatoes or the bun, but he relished the cheese and beef. He paced inside the carrier, he gurgled, he peered out at the advancing road.

It was time, I decided, for Mazie to hear the talk on Huck and the Higher Law. It’s not good to steal, I told her. And it’s not good to lie. But consider Huck. He was an orphan and outcast. He habitually stole. He was profane. And given a choice between truth and the lie, he always told the lie. And what’s a lie, but a fantastical story? But as he and Jim float down river deeper and deeper into the dark soul of the country, they are increasingly surrounded by the larger lies told by all the adults around them, and the largest lie of all, that Nigger Jim was chattel, a slave unworthy of even being considered human. And as Huck’s lies and the lies of the world compound around him, the deeper truth emerges, that he and Jim, outcasts though they may be, are friends and brothers.

It’s something to think about as we fumble through our own untruths, ever into the ascending darkness.

And with that, the interstate ribbon unfolds before us. Lots of ravens drift in and out of sight, sentinels each and every one. They roost on telephone wires, pick at carrion in the road, mouths agape, cool themselves on the side of the highway. Under their watchful eyes, the three of us – my daughter and I and a fugitive raven – descend off the Plateau, past the Colorado and into the Mojave.

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Poe eating road food

It Takes a Thief

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“Blame it, this whole thing is just as easy and awkward as it can be. And so it makes it so rotten difficult to get up a difficult plan. There ain’t no watchman to be drugged — now there oughtto be a watchman. There ain’t even a dog to give a sleeping-mixture to. And there’s Jim chained by one leg, with a ten-foot chain, to the leg of his bed: why, all you got to do is to lift up the bedstead and slip off the chain. And Uncle Silas he trusts everybody; sends the key to the punkin-headed nigger, and don’t send nobody to watch the nigger…..Why, drat it, Huck, it’s the stupidest arrangement I ever see. You got to invent all the difficulties. Well, we can’t help it; we got to do the best we can with the materials we’ve got.

Anyhow, there’s one thing — there’s more honor in getting him out through a lot of difficulties and dangers, where there warn’t one of them furnished to you by the people who it was their duty to furnish them, and you had to contrive them all out of your own head.”

And so spaketh Tom Sawyer in the 35th chapter of Huck Finn.

There’s the right way to do something and the wrong way.

In our case, Mazie imagines black face paint and ninja costumes.  Kerry dreams up fake transportation permits and forged documents from the Hopi Tribe.  I consider several furtive and superfluous transfers between waiting vehicles a la Mission Impossible.

In the end though, we just take him.

In our last moment before leaving Hopi, we disinter an old dog carrier from the garage and load it in the car.  That’s the extent of our plan.

A few hours later we find ourselves at the home of the wildlife rehabilitator.  We knock.

After a long wait, the husband shows himself.  His wife is gone.  He doesn’t know where she is, or when she’s getting back.

We came to visit Poe, we explain and he says that we are free to go to the back.

Which we do.  Mazie carries with her a Middlebury sweatshirt.  The air once again is filled with the cacophonous roar of jackhammers.  I step into the cage with Poe and he looks up with wearied eyes.  I whisper for Mazie to walk quickly to the car, retrieve a shred of burrito and bring it back.  I meanwhile sit with the stricken bird.  Mazie returns and we feed Poe with some scraps of meat that he takes eagerly.

And just like that I drop the sweatshirt over Poe and swaddle him in my arms.  I race across the yard.  Behind me I hear Mazie closing the gate so it is slightly ajar.  Goodbye Poe, she says.

We dive in the car and quick as can, we peel away.

 

Considerations

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Walpi Housing is all in transition.

Kerry and Kristina are moving out next month as are we.  We have a bunch of folks over for dinner and most everybody, including Hopi, are heading out in the coming weeks.

A particular era is over.

But where will this leave Poe?  It’s clear he’s not coming back here.  Without mending and stewardship in the near term, he would be finished.  Kerry and I contemplate taking him to Bernd Heinrich in Maine, but we don’t know if he still has his aviary.

And Poe deserves…he deserves what?

At the very least to live large.

He’s not a beast. And I wouldn’t denigrate him with the word animal.  He’s a being.  On par with human beings.  And every effort needs to be made to make him whole and restore him to raven-ness, whenever, and wherever that may be.

One morning I make an announcement.  We’re taking Poe, I say.

Mazie wants to know how.

We’ve already been read the riot act by the rehabilitation community.  He’s a protected species.  It’s illegal for people to own them or have them in their possession.  It’s illegal to transport them across state lines without a permit. And as I’ve been reminded, I haven’t been trained in rehabilitation.

Thank god.  If I was trained in anything, it would keep me from doing half the things I do.

Being Poe © Kerry Hardy

Poe imprisoned

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Mazie and I.  We’re on our way home.

I’d been in Sonoma for 4 weeks.  Mazie had joined her friend Grace in LA for the last few weeks while I was working through the house details.

After being away from Poe for over a month, we now found ourselves in Flagstaff, checking in to see how Poe was getting on with the wildlife rehabilitator.

He was not good.

On one hand the rehabilitator had given Poe antibiotics, which undoubtedly had helped.  But for 4 of the 5 weeks, she had kept him indoors in a small dog carrier.  His breast feathers were abraded and missing.  His tail feathers were a complete mess.

In the last week she had released him to a larger cage outdoors, but on the adjacent property, literally a few dozen feet away, they were literally blowing up a limestone cliff.  The air was filled with the deafening sound of jackhammers.  And on the other side of the yard several large dogs barked incessantly.

This was madness.

Mazie and I stepped into Poe’s cage and sat down with him.  Drowning the overwhelming cacophony, he looked around skittishly.  He sat in a pile of dried dogfood – basically the staple of his diet.

It has vitamins in it, the rehabilitator assured us.

Poe looked up toward us and made his customary feeding calls.  He recognized us as his feeders. But this time the calls were soft and plaintive.

The rehabilitator went to retrieve a scale so that we could weigh him (I guess this is vital to rehabilitation), but as she approached, Poe grew even more skittish and flapped his wings aggressively.

The rehabilitator said that he didn’t like her because she had been forced to tube feed him.

As she tried to step in, Poe edged out of the cage and immediately made for the open yard.  The rehabilitator herself grew agitated and she turned to get him back in.

I looked around.  The expansive yard was surrounded by an eight foot fence.  Tall ponderosas shaded the grass.

What’s the problem? I asked.  Is there a dog?  Anything that can get him?  Let’s give him some space, I said.

Well, umm. It’s just that he might try and get away, she stammered.

Get away?  First off, isn’t that the point?  And secondly, he had a busted wing.  This bird wasn’t going nowhere.

The rehabilitator acquiesced, but not before reminding me that from a rehabilitator’s perspective, it wasn’t safe and that I wasn’t trained in this.

Under the trees, Poe easily relaxed.  He began to play with twigs and branches and dig in the ground looking for grubs.  Mazie and I sat with him as quietly as we could given the roar of the jackhammers.

Perhaps I could let him out a few times during the week, she offered.

The rehabilitator made an attempt to weigh Poe, but she couldn’t tell if his weight had gone up or down.  We helped her get him back in his cage and bid farewell.

Once inside the car, Mazie turned to me.

Did you see all the other animals she had in cages? she asked.

Guardians

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Poe ensconced with a wildlife rehabilitator in Flagstaff. And Mazie and I are camped out in Sonoma California, trying to piece together a new life out here for our family.

We’ve found house to buy. It’s big and green and old and wonderful. But after eight years at Hopi, it’s hard to imagine a life as wild and wonderful and full of serendipity as the one we now have. Is this it? After decades of wandering, are we now settling down? Where’s the adventure in it?

On a Tuesday morning, sitting in the courtyard outside the Sebastopol Inn, I call our friends Kerry and Kristina back home. I’m worried, I tell them. How are we going to make a new life for ourselves out here?

Kristina’s answer is simple. This thing that we need to do is too big, she says. We can’t do it alone. So we need to put it out there, we need to seek out our allies and be available when they present themselves.

As for Kerry, he points out that when driving into Walpi Housing in the middle of a barren desert, would we have ever imagined that it was an ideal spot for building large wooden structures, and butchering a cow, and raising a mess of ravens? Could we have even conceived of the adventures that awaited us there?

—

Two hours later, Mazie and I sit in the Holy Cow coffee shop in Sebastopol. I’m despairing. Will I be able to talk to the ravens in our new home? I ask Mazie.

Daad, she says, and rolls her eyes in a way to indicate that once again I’m proving myself an embarrassment.

On the wall behind her hangs a large painting of a young girl cradling a crow. And further down, another canvas of an enormous raven perched on the body of a baby. I step up to take a picture of it and an older woman sitting at a nearby table asks if I’m interested in ravens.

She’s read all about them, she says.

Bernd Heinrich? I ask.

Heinrich is amazing, she says and we high five.

I tell her the story of the wash ravens and she tells me about herself. Her name is Maryann Markus. She used to teach, but she’s retired and she’s built herself a studio and she spends much of her time drawing nests. She is fascinated by ravens, she considers them her totems. There’s something I’ve never shown anybody, she says removing a velvet pouch from her purse. Inside, a hematite figurine of a raven. I squeeze it in my hand and rub it and squeeze it again. It’s heavy and has the dense sensibility of a low rumbling current.

She looks at me. It’s yours now, she says. They’re such powerful birds, guardians really. She asks if I’ve met Michael, the owner of the coffee shop and to fellow who did the paintings. She leads me to the back to introduce us.

He’s my age more or less, introspective and gentle seeming. Michael, too, says he can’t get his mind off these birds. He’s been fixated on them a while and keeps working them, making image after image. They’re deep, intense creatures, he says, and we’re afraid to let them into our lives. He says that the image of the baby and the bird scared people, but that they misinterpreted it. I see him as a protector, he says.

I tell him about the raven in our care and how our neighbor killed and maimed two of them. How I was fed up and in a weird way it was a last straw for us. I just wanted to get out of there.

But that’s all part of it, too, he says. You can’t run from that either. He says he hopes our move here works out well and that things take a good turn with the house. Before I leave, he gives me a hug.

I walk out of his office and see one more canvas.

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Rehabilitation

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For all you ravenites out there, the saga continues.

In July, our family and Kerry’s were going to be gone for much of the month.  Never and More had joined up with the adolescents from the other family groups and were spending most of their time out in the desert.

Kerry did an exemplary job meeting them in the desert, feeding them dead lizards, letting them fly off with their new found friends and capturing shots of their flying prowess.

Never and More in flight © Kerry Hardy

Pretty much every day, though, they would come home and hang in the shade of porch or visit with Poe who was still hobbled by his broken wing.

Never and More descend for a visit © Kerry Hardy

With each day, however, Poe seemed to be struggling.  It was tough with the heat, his appetite curbed, and with his siblings gone, he became less and less active.  Kerry and I agreed that with all of us gone, Poe’s chances of surviving the month were scant.

Injured Poe © Kerry Hardy

Resigned, we agreed that Kerry would took Poe down to Flagstaff and place him with a “wildlife rehabilitator.”  Which he did.  And all seemed good.  Poe settled in with the elderly woman.  And we were told that if he didn’t recover his flight, he could move to Bearizona, a wildlife sanctuary near Williams.  There he would be used as a “teaching tool.”  The ravens there were quite smart, we were told.  If they were handed a dollar bill, they would drop it in a piggy bank.  And if they were handed a plastic frog, they knew to put it in some water.

The thought broke my heart.

Poe being transported to Flagstaff © Kerry Hardy

Raven Cognition. Raven Food.

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I’ve been trying to feed Poe industrial hamburger meat (from Circle M).  It’s the only time I’ve ever seen one of these ravens spit food out.  And we call it fit for human consumption…

Call it the end result of what we call civilization:  Advanced Meat Recovery.  In a modern day slaughterhouse, they  blast a carcass with a high pressure hose to recover any last bit of flesh and gristle and then churn it into hamburger.   Or as Kerry said, it’s what you do after you’ve already taken the lips and asshole and served it up to some poor unsuspecting consumer.

This morning Kerry brought over a dead rabbit that his dog had caught.  He fastened it to the top of the ramada and placed Poe proximate to give him a chance to pick and feed in a more raven like way.

He also set out to retrieve the other two ravens from the wash.  But as he stepped away from the yard (us conversing loudly all the while), we saw two lone figures making a swift approach in the distance.

Sure enough, it was Never and More.  They soon circled the yard and alighted on the fence near Kerry.  They kept bouncing and circling around him.  Amazing window into their cognition.

  1. Ravens recognize Kerry as a source of meat. This idea has persistence in their brains over many days.
  2. They recognize his voice as distinct from other voices.
  3. They associate his voice with him.

Not receiving food from him, they took to the ramada where Poe was, but they boosted away from him and the carcass pretty quickly.  Again:

  1. They showed a fear of a new foreign object.  A dead one at that.
  2. Death is scary.  That is, until we recognize it as food.  Then all is fare game.

Kerry brought his hand beneath the carcass.  The other ravens caught the gesture, squawked and flew back to the ramada.  He fed some rabbit entrails to Poe, they observed. He tried baiting Never and More with intestine, but they wouldn’t take it.

  1. They need to learn that a carcass is food.

How long will it take them to learn?  If the parents were present, would they teach or model behavior and would the ravens learn more quickly?

  1. Poe began pecking at the carcass.  Never and More squawked.
  2. Never and More gave their danger squawk.  We looked outside and saw Lola approaching.
  3. More grabbed rabbit entrails and took it to the ground.
  4. Poe continued feeding and Never ascended to observe.  He later flew down to join More.
  5. More, however had cached his meat on the ground.  Never found the meat and began to taste it.  I’m sure that caching is a sign that an object is of interest.  If More cached something, it must be good, it must have value.
  6. Never and More got into an intestine contest.
  7. Poe continued at his chowing up top.
  8. A lone adult perched on a lamppost facing us and called out in four short repetitive, gutteral trills.

Neighbors wonder if the ravens are hanging out at Kerry’s now, looking for food.  Folks don’t get that we have complex relations with these birds, that they come and go and fly about based on a whole set of variables.

The house sitter thought at one time taking them to the wash was too close if our goal was to make them go away.  Again, she missed it.  Our goal is not to make wild things go away.  Instead it’s to reintegrate these birds back into their environment and ecosystem.  That ecosystem includes the Wepo Wash, the other flocks, the parents, and to a limited extent, Walpi Housing.  For years the mating pairs have been doing flyovers, observing us, perching on the lamp posts, scavenging nest materials form our yards.  It’s fine that the birds come here, as long as it’s within the context of the larger environment and they’re capable of surviving on their own.

I hear the other young calling out in their playful sing song from somewhere out in the wash.  Never and More playfully follow the motions of the dancing hummingbirds.

The young flock approaches and circles and dives above our house, calling all the while, and eventually break apart and disappear to the south.

As I sign off, Poe has descended from the ramada.  Never soaks in the water.  More explores the yard.  Two hummingbirds circle.  the Plymouths rest in the shade.  The two other chickens scratch by the honeysuckle.  Two doves hang on the fence.  Lots of flies (call them pollinators).  Mango sits at my feet, watching it all.

Going Wild

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More and Never didn’t roost at home last night.  But we think we know why.

While on his run yesterday, Kerry spied six ravens in the wash tributary by his house.  He displayed some raw elk meat (leave it to a downeaster to be running around with raw meat in his pocket), but none of the ravens were interested.

Later though, after he had fetched Poe from the wash, two split off from the pack and landed right next to him.  For the second day, Poe and More had been hanging with the adolescent flock!

Earlier I thought I had heard the sing song call near our house which now seems quite possible.  The new routine for Never and More now includes some house time (they like picking through the chicken feed and hanging with Poe), and lots of away time.  They’ll come and go during the day.  When they get bored at our house, they’re just as soon to take off and maybe check out Kerry’s or to go off elsewhere, presumably with the other birds.  If they can keep it up, we all will be quite happy.

More questions, though.  What’s the normal routine for the other adolescents?  Are they always in a pack?  Do they split off into singles and pairs as well for part of the day and then recongregate?  Are they roosting communally?

Do they perhaps have a set feeding period in which they all split off to find food individually (less competition for a single resource)?  More and Never know right away where there’s some good pickings – they can get free water and lots of scavengy refuse from the yard and compost.  They also like the chicken feed.  The other birds may go off in different directions and catch as catch can.  They may then recongregate in the afternoon for hang out time.  Lots yet to figure out.

As for Poe, we’ve decided that  since we’re no longer leading More and Never to the wash, he might as well stay at home in the yard to recoup his strength.  If More and Never are out and about, he’s basically alone down there and it doesn’t seem to push him to develop strength.

He’s a sitter and observer.  At least in the yard he has the stimulation of the other animals.  And the approaching dogs sometimes keep him moving, which is good.  We also have more chances to incent him to flap his wings and get a move on it.  I fear, though, that he may be settling into his crippled mode and perceiving himself as disabled.

That dang bird.  I love him so.

I’ll have to look into adaptive skiing programs.

Poe Learning © Andrew Lewis

Quoth not the Raven

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I heard a new sound from the wild ravens today.

When Never and More returned (or so it appeared) with the four wild ravens, the four adolescents called out in a delightfully sweet sing-songy call.  Even after they settled in the desert 50 yards from the house, the continued to fill the air with sound.  Never and More, however, sat mutely on the fence.

According to Heinrich, ravens may have the greatest number of vocalizations out of any other birds [Any readers who’ve gotten this far have to check out Ravens in Winter].  But he also cautions that we shouldn’t get sidetracked by this idea of “language” as a sole proof of cognition.  Animals (including humans) can have (and communicate) symbolic or visual ideas without expressing them through “language”.  What’s key here might be whether the birds can use sound and motion to communicate intent and information to influence the behavior of their peers.  Clearly they can.

Our ears here at Walpi Housing have detected at least 6 distinct vocalizations.  There’s the loud relentless hungry call.  They would do this as young, their mouths gaped open, yawning to be fed.  Then the defensive/aggressive call used to scare away an intruder.  It’s feels like a shrill growl and is sometimes accompanied by a circling and prodding forward and falling back (imagine a boxer baiting an opponent in the ring).  Third, there’s the gentle gurgle when being fed or recently sated.  Fourth, the call and response murmur. It’s like a brief purr, or the “hmmm…yes…hmmm” that you get from a good active listener.  Fifth is a conversant squawk.  I squawk, you squawk.  But it’s not aggressive and more like a loud animated conversation between friends.  Except that they know what’s being said and we don’t.  And now lastly, the playful, sing-song call.

Of course, I would bet that these birds can say a hell of a lot more than that.  I’m just slow at learning raven.  As with prairie dog speech [Also check out the great NPR/Radio Lab story on prairie dogese], their language could possibly include a range of microtones that our ear can’t detect.  Their language could also include accompanying behavior or gestures or the simple (and complex) modeling of behavior.

Our birds have largely grown up feral:  they’ve been removed from raven society and have had to grow up in a human/cat/dog/chicken society.  Although we’ve done our best to feed and care for them, any well-meaning raven equipped with a cell phone would have long ago called CPS.

We are totally unskilled at communicating the wealth of information and skills a parent raven would model and teach their young. We can’t fly, let alone fly efficiently.  We don’t know good food from very good food, from bad.  I can’t build a nest with my hands let alone a beak.  And though I can pretend, I can’t talk raven.

Of course, that’s not entirely true.  Inter-species communication revolves in part around communicating intent.  And that may or may not involve words.  It may happen through creating a “sense” in one’s mind and being, and letting that sense communicate itself (through sub-conscious behavior or telepathically or whatever).  It sounds wacky, but how many times have you walked into a room, seen someone and recognized immediately, I like that person.  I want to be with them.  It’s Malcolm Gladwell’s “first handshake” – that the majority of your impressions of a person are formed within the first five seconds.

Or take our recent time away.  A nervous house sitter stepped in and the household slipped into chaos.  The cats ran away (for 15 days!), Mango the dog was afraid to go out, the stray busted into the chicken coop, and the chickens stopped laying.  Ravens wouldn’t allow the house sitter to approach, while Kerry could just saunter up.  Then we returned.  A few minutes of meows and calls by the hospital and the emaciated cats poked their heads out from the culverts.  Chester the stray returned to his characteristic abeyance.  Mango perked up, and we’re back to two eggs a day now.  We’re back to a peaceable kingdom.  How is it that our presence can communicate “all is well, all is safe” and balance be restored?

Think also of Cesar, the Dog Whisperer.  Or better yet, the original Horse Whisperer [the recent documentary Buck is a must see].

So back to the sweet sing-song call of the ravens.  I heard it from the four wild ravens, but not from Never and More.  It could be that they were wary, or didn’t yet know the social cues that would help them fit in with the crowd.  But it made me wonder about the language instinct and language acquisition among birds.  I hazard that something like the language instinct is there; even without the influence of the parents, the ravens share information.  Hungry birds call out shrilly (imagine the nerve-rattling quality of a baby’s cry).  Or dog approaches Poe, and Never and More call out defensively.

But what of more nuanced communication?  Like humans, do ravens have a critical period in which the parents can jumpstart the language acquisition ability, and if they miss the window, the birds won’t be able to get it?

I think of the girl Genie [check out the classic New Yorker article by Russ Rymer]   who in the 1970’s was raised in far more feral conditions than our poor ravens. She spent the first 13 years of her life locked in a room tied to a potty chair.  Her father beat her and silenced her whenever she attempted to make a sound and other family members were forbidden to speak to her.

Genie grew up without language.  And despite being strikingly intelligent and communicative, she could never learn how to communicate her ideas through speech.

What of our birds, then?  We’ve spared them from grievous abuse (as far as we know), but have the poor things missed a window that would have allowed them rich communication with their fellow birds?  Why should emergent neural pathways in a highly developed and socially oriented avian brain develop any differently than that of a human?

I want their fellow birds to ask them.  And what if they can’t answer?  What if quoth not the Raven?  What if Nevermore?

Mowgli

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This morning, Poe alone in the yard.  No Never.  No More.

In the west toward Floyd’s field, a mile distant, I heard a few calls.  I suspected it was More and Never, but wasn’t sure.  Two days ago on the walk back from the wash, a solitary raven did a fly over.  Poe (in my arms) was the first to catch sight of him and struggled excitedly.  One of our ravens observed where the wild one landed and flew over to join him.  The second raven soon followed.  Never and More had taken off to join one of the wild ravens.  Since it was solitary, we assumed it to be one of the parents.  And there they remained together, all three flitting about in the desert and getting acquainted.

At dusk, Never and More returned and settled in for the evening.

So now, this morning, I have little doubt that the two are off with their new found friend.  But lo, what do I see approaching?  What appear to be six adolescents, dipping, soaring, circling around one another as they approach the house, all the while calling out playfully (more on this in the next post).  I step to the back yard just as four of the ravens settle onto the rise beyond our yard.  And there are Never and More perched on the fence.  The wild ravens continue to call.  It’s not defensive, but more like a summons:  come out and play, join us, why are you sitting on the fence?  But More and Never don’t respond.

I swaddle Poe and set out toward the wash, hoping the other two will follow, (as part of the on-going experiment, I don’t overtly lead them with food this time, waiting to see if they’ll just follow Poe) but they remain where they are, tired perhaps from their morning exertions.  The four wild ravens, however, follow (and lead) us out, and eventually settle in the brush on the far bank while I put Poe in his customary place beneath the tree.  I feed him and he turns to face in the direction of the other birds.  I also leave meat out for them, hoping to attract them to Poe.

I feel like a doting parent trying to introduce my child to new friends on the first day of pre-school.  Please, I want to say, he’s a good bird.  Please, will you be friends with him?

Poe, Alone

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We’re trying to help the ravens return to their kind.  But it’s hard.

They’ve all had a good number of Wepo Wash days.  We have to carry Poe, but Never and More will go back and forth between our house and the wash at will.  At dusk, though, they return home to the ramada to roost.

Yesterday was blazing hot.  We were to be gone into the evening and so didn’t take Poe out because we wouldn’t be able to retrieve him before dark.

Never and More didn’t leave either, though. Instead they chose to hang around with Poe.  It could have been that it was just too dang hot (all the birds sat around, following the shade, their mouths gaping open as a cooling response).  Or it could have been that they enjoyed being in close proximity to water.

Or perhaps they just wanted to be with Poe.  A couple times when one or the other of the dogs approached him (Poe tends to hang out on the ground), the other two alighted near by and cawed defensively.

When I returned that evening though, More and Never were nowhere in sight.  For the first time, they chose not roost at the house.  A good thing, I thought.  But that left Poe, alone, roosting on the back of one of the porch chairs.  The dogs sniffed at him and he was safe, but I thought it not good for him to become too comfortable with our house.

I carried him over to a log leaning against the ramada and he clambered up it in an ungainly way.  It wasn’t too comfortable of a roost and he had to work to stay balanced, so I brought the ladder over and he soon alighted on that.  He took to his customary habit of staring off silently into the desert, as if awaiting for someone or something.  He’s one to always look out, away from even his siblings.  I wish any of you could experience his gaze, so solitary and at once both hopeful and resigned.

I lay in the hammock, looking up at the stars.  And I talked to Poe.  And he murmured back.  I felt sad and worried for him, stuck with my meager human company.  He needs to get better.  He needs to fly.  Or soon he will be left behind, first by his siblings and then the other ravens.  And then even by us.  It felt too unjust.  Too undeserving.  And with only that, he and I continued to wait.  We stared out into space and that deluge of stars.